I guess no one could have known, looking into his face, what a remarkable man he was. The usual spontaneity and drama were gone. The mischievous glint, the you-can’t-resist-me sparkle in his limitless hazel eyes had been distinguished, leaving them dull and empty like a great caverns.
They say eyes are the windows to the soul – but Gerard had drawn the curtains on his long ago. He’d learnt to hide who he was. Conceal the fact that he was becoming something he detested, something he never planned to be. Gerard was falling ever deeper into a black hole of depression and drugs; so far in, now, that I don’t think I could reach him to pull him to safety even if he wanted me to.

I remember a time when Gerard hadn’t been so talented at bottling things up inside. When we would abandon the others in the tour bus - with its sickening aroma of sweat and spilt milk - and take long walks along moonlit highways, with the cool summer breeze in our faces and the scent of wet grass and gasoline filling the air – just to talk. We would walk for miles, stepping cautiously in single file along verges by the sides of motorways, risking our lives – and only to talk!

But those days are dead and gone now. For the first time I can admit it, what I’d been trying to convince myself wasn’t true; wasn’t happening.

Gerard was dead and gone. The Gerard I knew, at least. This man sitting before me on a white plastic chair - dripping with rainwater, by the barbed wire fence that surrounded the lonely trailer park wasn’t Gerard – he might as well be a stranger to me, a stranger I’d been living with for the past 6 years, but a stranger none the less.

But this wasn’t what I wanted, and I wasn’t going to let this go without a fight.

With a steely glint in my eyes, my heart pounding in my chest out of sheer determination I rose to me feet and felt – almost without thinking - my legs carry me towards Gerard, flicking his lighter on and off, the amber flame lighting up his dead eyes.

I lunged forwards, gripping his frail, limp shoulders in each of my hands, pinning him back onto the chair, forcing him to look at me – straight at me – for the first time in what felt like a lifetime. He looked like a dear caught in headlights: helpless, terrified, and doomed.

I felt the anger, the fear of loosing him - the most important person in the world to me – well up inside me.

“What’s happening to you?!” I screamed into his frightened face, tears filling up his eyes.

I thought… I was sure he was going to turn his head away – attempt to ignore me, as he always did. But instead - to my massive surprise – he raised his head to fill in what could only have been a couple of inches between our lips, and kissed me.